Book Image

Pandas Cookbook

By : Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Pandas Cookbook

By: Theodore Petrou

Overview of this book

This book will provide you with unique, idiomatic, and fun recipes for both fundamental and advanced data manipulation tasks with pandas 0.20. Some recipes focus on achieving a deeper understanding of basic principles, or comparing and contrasting two similar operations. Other recipes will dive deep into a particular dataset, uncovering new and unexpected insights along the way. The pandas library is massive, and it's common for frequent users to be unaware of many of its more impressive features. The official pandas documentation, while thorough, does not contain many useful examples of how to piece together multiple commands like one would do during an actual analysis. This book guides you, as if you were looking over the shoulder of an expert, through practical situations that you are highly likely to encounter. Many advanced recipes combine several different features across the pandas 0.20 library to generate results.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Selecting with unique and sorted indexes

Index selection performance drastically improves when the index is unique or sorted. The prior recipe used an unsorted index that contained duplicates, which makes for relatively slow selections.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we use the college dataset to form unique or sorted indexes to increase the performance of index selection. We will continue to compare the performance to boolean indexing as well.

How to do it...

  1. Read in the college dataset, create a separate DataFrame with STABBR as the index, and check whether the index...